Locke

Six months after seeing the premiere of "Locke" at the Venice Film Festival, I remembered scenes that I never actually saw. I imagined Tom Hardy, who plays the title actor, in dramatic encounters with various characters - I could even see the other actors' faces. Only later, when reminded, did I recall that Hardy is the only person to appear onscreen over the course of the entire movie.

This speaks to the effectiveness of "Locke," which takes place in a car, as a man drives from Birmingham to London. All the conversations happen over the phone, as Locke talks hands free, and the voices come over the speakers. Each call is crucial, and he has much to accomplish during the drive. Everything is converging in these next few hours - the biggest job of his career, and the worst personal crisis of his life.

If the journey marks a point of passage for the character, so it does for the man who plays him. Prior to this, Tom Hardy was best known for action movies - most flamboyantly as the villain, Bane, in "The Dark Knight Rises" - and for a horrible, tasteless romantic comedy, "This Means War," in which he didn't even get the girl. Here he gets to show what he can do. Just sitting in a car talking, with two eyes on the road, he conveys a complicated nature, that of someone whose strengths and weaknesses are so bound together that it's difficult to know where one ends and one begins.

This is someone with a strong will, but too strong; who has confidence, but too much; who is honest, but sometimes ought to think about lying; and whose sense of responsibility is so pristine that he's about to nail himself to a cross. In "Locke," you see the slow-motion spectacle of someone's life coming apart, and it would be an empty experience if that someone were an easy mark. But as played by Hardy, Ivan Locke is a formidable character, one who doesn't have to raise his voice or alter the lilt in his polite Northern accent to convey power.

Much of Locke's conversation has to do with concrete. Locke is the manager of a major construction project and an apparent expert in pouring concrete, which, as we learn, has to be handled delicately and precisely. Tomorrow is the biggest pour of his life, and part of the texture of "Locke," its feeling of reality, is in hearing specific details of Locke's work, as though eavesdropping on a series of conversations. There is always more than we can fully understand, but we can follow along.

In between conversations, director Steven Knight will sometimes cut to a shot of the road at night, and the headlights and streetlights look so smeary and indistinct as to suggest Locke's desolate aloneness. Everything outside is going by, as usual, indifferent to the earth-shaking, life-shaking movements taking place in that car.

It would be misleading to say that "Locke" completely transcends its own constraints. It succeeds completely, except in the one way that would have made its success absolute: It's impossible to forget that this is a one-actor movie. Almost everyone will go in knowing that, and those who don't will catch on midway that they're watching some kind of experiment.

But make no mistake, it's a good experiment, and a good movie, and a heartening one, too. Cinema is not about special effects, but about human emotion and a face in close-up. For those in doubt, "Locke" is the proof.